Musings on computers and software as I continue learning and sharing software development knowledge.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Book Review: Java EE 7 Essentials

I have recently finished reviewing the book, 'Java EE 7 Essentials' by Arun Gupta which took me considerable amount of time as I was on and off in its study and have not done any major development/study in enterprise java space recently.
As I was having prior experience in j2ee, I was more keen in knowing what new changes have been transpired since the Java EE 6 in the enterprise java specification. One of the noticeable observation is the fact that this book does not follows a sample application (like the famous petstore example). Depending upon your reading habits, it may or may not bother you.
To understand topics like dependency injection, I had to use the internet as my resource as well, for example, to understand differences in its approach in enterprise java & spring. However, when comparing this against the standard j2ee resources, this is more fun to read and does not bores you down to every little detail (which can be obtained from the api/documentation itself).
The book covers the entire enterprise java stack which can be classified under the following points:

Servlets, JSF

RESTful and SOAP based Web Services

JSON processing

Websockets & server endpoints

EJB & JPA specification

Context & Dependency Injection in Java EE

Concurrency

Bean Validation

JTA and JMS

Batch Processing

It is helpful to know a basic idea of these concepts as the book dives right into what's new and noteworthy for JavaEE 7 release.
Finally, creation of a sample application is explained that is a three tired architecture which uses the enterprise java detailed in the book.
For an enterprise java expert or beginner, this is the current go-to book to get started with the Java EE 7 specification and makes the learning somewhat less painful that it used to be.
Although setting up application servers is not dealt with, basic instructions to install and use Netbeans IDE (Java EE bundle) are provided which contains the tomcat application server itself.
Disclaimer: I received my copy of the book in its beta version through the oreilly's bloggers review program.